To be able to issue currency or determine what passes for money and on what terms, is the ability to impose your will on others and settle deals in your favour.So small wonder that governments, bankers, billionaires and would-be-billionaires see the benefit in fighting to issue money. Go back to history and you see kings have issued currency, bankers/ moneychangers/ money movers and central bankers have issued currencies and then again desperate societies have often come up with tokens for use amongst themselves…………The same old game is playing out again.

Following speech is a sample of a banker trying to ally with state power to squish private money issuers. Read the arguments,file them away for future reference. If you hear these arguments repeated in the media, know them for the propaganda they are. Are they all rubbish arguments? NO. But neither are they the whole story. And passively swallowing them doesn’t serve your best interests. Read more of this post

Cryptocurrencies have captured the public imagination as the price of bitcoin et al skyrocketed and made lakhiers and crorepatis of both famous and obscure people. Never mind that many lost their fortunes even before they could start celebrating ! The adrenalin rush is a siren song to certain personality types……..

And I daily get calls, messages and e-mails asking what I think of cryptocurrency investments. The querants range from Sotheby’s-Gulf to small businesspeople from Russia. So here’s my answer : Are you a whale? Do you want to be one? Can you be one ?Do you fancy your chances playing against whales ?

Think:

Bitcoin was built by a tight-knit community of technology buffs and entrepreneurs, and a relatively small number of them own an outsized share of the cryptocurrency. As few as 1,000 people may own around 40% of all existing bitcoin.

As smaller investors enter the market drawn by the price action, the question to ask is whether those “whales” are in a position to take advantage of the newcomers?

The Denationalization of Money is a 1976 book by Friedrich Hayek, in which he advocates the establishment of competitively issued private moneys.

According to Hayek, instead of a national government issuing a specific currency, use of which is imposed on all members of its economy by force in the form of legal tender laws, private businesses should be allowed to issue their own forms of money, deciding how to do so on their own and have the currencies compete for acceptance. Read more of this post

Founded in 2009, Bitcoin is a digital currency that is not issued by any central bank or other centralized authority but by an open source software through a process called ‘mining’. Globally, there are over 11 million Bitcoins in circulation worth over $1.2 billion.Over 80% of Bitcoins today are traded on a Tokyo-based digital currency exchange called Mt. Gox. At present, India does not have a centralized Bitcoin exchange, but users in India can buy and sell coins through websites such as localbitcoins.com. The community here is believed to be some 50,000-strong, with as many as 23,000 India based users having an online Bitcoin wallet where the digital currency is stored.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, Cyrptocurrency is a form of digital currency used over the internet for trading or payment for services. The currency is finite in number to keep inflation rates low and uses peer-to-peer transfer technology. It is encrypted using cryptography for security and hence cannot be easily counterfeited. It can be transferred from a computer or a smartphone to another anonymously and cannot be tracked. The value of such a currency is usually determined by supply and demand — similar to precious metals like gold. Read more of this post